A Flash Flood

People tend to lean on platitudes when they lose someone they love.  Being a writer doesn’t change that impulse.  I can’t believe it’s been a year since we let Flash go.  I allowed myself to read the chapters I posted last August detailing the experience of losing a family pet, through the prism of a home euthanasia.  I appreciate those of you who took the time to read them.  Over a thousand of you allowed me to pour my heart out on the page, and sharing it with readers was somehow comforting.  I was able to write things I couldn’t say out loud.

First, you should know that I haven’t changed my mind about whether or not it was necessary.  I’ve reflected on the decision I made many times and the answer always comes back the same…it was his time.

Yet that doesn’t make it any easier.  I’ve discovered that when you finally vacuum up all of the hair…and it DOES take months, if you don’t have a staff…after you’ve given away the toys and dishes and thrown away the beds…there are landmines that you will casually trip over in a home movie or a photo album.  It can be experienced as a sudden and violent pain, or as a deep ache that feels like a solid mass in your chest, one that will remain for a time.  Faulkner said if he had to choose between pain and nothing, he would choose pain.  That may be true…but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to tell him to go Faulk himself.

There have been a lot of things happening in my life over the last couple of years.  My children moved out and moved on, first to college and then beyond.  My performing career has ended, as I can no longer remember my lines (well, to be fair, I CAN remember my lines…I just can’t remember where they go!).  Talk of retirement is no longer this vague abstract.  I’ve quit smoking since Flash passed, creating a possibility that I will live to be an old man.  And good God, would Flash be pissed.  In the middle of winter he could be sure someone would go outside with him, as I was always willing to puff down a coffin nail while he dallied in the yard, no matter the temperature.

Kathy and I have developed hobbies and made a special effort to get together with friends new and old.  It is a peculiar feeling leaving the house in the morning for an outing with an open-ended time for return. 

No one is waiting for us.   

It hits you at odd times, for me, usually coming home from work.  There was always an hour, maybe an hour and a half, where Flash and I were a duo waiting for Kath to get home, which kicked off the dinner hour.  I would talk to him just like I’m talking to you…just out loud.  I know (and knew) he understood only a few of the words I was saying while I prepared the dinner for the humans.  But he hung on every syllable…standing sentinel beside the cabinet that held the milk bones.  Sometimes, when I was finished talking about ‘that asshole’ at work, he seemed to even shake his head a little when he walked away.  Maybe he was simpatico…or maybe it was just a housefly. 

Now, when I turn my key in the back door, I hear only the sigh of a screen door’s springs, divorced from the sound of tiny human feet or even tinier paws.  And that’s okay.  As times change, we will change with them.

We don’t want another pet.  Not right now.  We are not putting all of our poker chips on the square marked ‘Grandchildren’.  Not right now. Life is different, but life is, most definitely, good.  I have learned over the last year that I have a need to nurture and love.  Kath has a garden she likes to fuss after.  I’ve stepped up a bit helping out, but I’m not sure I have the green thumb.  Still, it was a special thrill helping her plant a tree back by our pet cemetery.  It was, of course, a dogwood.

My wife and I also have each other.  Hand-in-hand, over the last twenty-six years, we’ve been through so many things.  The quiet isn’t that tough.  The echoes of those we love, or loved, reverberate still.  We take comfort in the memories as we approach each tomorrow with open hearts and open minds. 

Sorry, but I’m back to the platitudes again.  We are twelve months out.  I haven’t lied to you yet and I won’t start now. When I read the year-old posts today, I cried.  It was a Flash flood.  Not because he is gone, but because he couldn’t stay as he was, before he got old.  He was a good dog.  He was a sweetie.     

Flash is gone, but not forgotten. I think that's the way it should be.

LAST DAY: August 29, 2016 (Afternoon)

In the end, it was over very quickly.  It actually took more time to cook the cheeseburger than it did to administer the two shots that stopped his breathing.  

Kathy got home at four p.m., understandably a bit shaken.  She changed out of her work clothes and joined Flash and I on the deck, where we have enjoyed so many good times these last three years.  It’s crazy to see the timing of his passing.  I had written a blog three years ago when he began losing his sight, forwarding the theory that Flash wanted to hang on until the children got out of the house, to help ME get through the transition.  Dan moved out two weeks ago.  Flash went into serious decline almost immediately.

Still, when the veterinarian and her tech arrived promptly at 4:30, it felt too soon.  Rationally, I knew they were right on time.  For Flash’s sake, perhaps a little overdue.  For me, emotionally, it was the closing of a chapter.  Children no longer run through the sprinkler, turning the grass near the porch into a mudhole.  When Flash came to us, three of my grandparents were still alive.  They are all gone now.  My hair was long and just beginning to thin in the back.  It is completely white and sparse today.

They took the money and had me sign a paper right after they met the dog.  While I read over the contract, they curried his favor with bits of cooked chicken from a Ziploc bag.  I’m certain he smelled the other dogs on their clothing…did he smell death, too? It was eerily quiet in the backyard.  No birds chirped, no squirrels chattered.  It remained that way into the darkness.

If he did sense his demise, he was okay with it.  He was placid and compliant when we coaxed him onto a pillow covered with a bed sheet.  The sheet was my idea.  Twice before, bringing the body home after the euthanasia, I had carried the body from the car to the garden.  Twice before, I had seen the dog’s tongue loll from their lifeless mouth.  I didn’t ever want to see it again.  I wish I could forget it even now.

The process moves along at a pace.  It isn’t haste, but it is efficiency.  They explain the first step and perform their duty.   They assure you that they are in no hurry, but it seems like a practiced approach, a rhythm most of us wouldn’t be able to nail on a first (or even a third) try.  The dog is likely suffering, which is why they’ve been hired.  The humans are suffering, because they see a member of the tribe in pain.  You’ve signed the papers and they’ve explained what they are going to do.  Your only job as the pet owner is to keep the patient calm.  When the sedative from the first syringe hit, Flash didn’t need a lot of help staying calm.  Shit, I hope he was as high as a kite.  His head was in Kathy’s lap.  I stroked his back and his flanks, running my hand over his chest, feeling his heart beating.  Slower, but still beating.

When they prime that second syringe, you have a minute or so left.  If you can keep your sockets dry at that moment, then either you or your dog is a dick.

The needle gingerly enters the vein.  The plunger is pulled back and a freshet of blood appears in the syringe.  Then the tech’s thumb pushes down.  If you were to shout at that moment, “No, wait!” you would have waited too long.  We did not ask for a reprieve.  Flash’s face is serene, as if he had just arrived home from that long-ago trip to the lake and found his favorite napping place.  I feel no heartbeat.  The vet places her stethoscope several places around his trunk and hears nothing.  She shakes her head, ‘No.’

Truthfully, I don’t even remember them leaving.  That’s why you take care of the business part first.  After we covered Flash’s body with the sheet, I cry into the right side of Kathy’s neck for a moment.  The right side of my neck is wet with her tears.

As we carried his body to the garden, I remember a conversation we had when we moved the hosta.  After Brooklyn had passed, I placed a hood ornament from a Cadillac on top of the stone marking his grave.  Kath asked me, nearly twenty years later, “If Brooklyn was the Cadillac of dogs, what is Flash?”  I told her Flash was a mini-van.  My wife was somewhat offended by my comment, but I stand beside it.  There are police dogs, service dogs, show dogs, hunting dogs, rescue dogs, there are dogs for many applications.  Flash was a family dog.  He existed to be a member of a family.  That was his job.  It’s not flashy, like a Cadillac.  It’s sturdy and long lasting and utilitarian, like a mini-van.

When the old family vehicle goes to the junkyard, you don’t remember much about the trim and the stereo or the fold-back seats.  You remember the places you went with it and how you felt at that moment.  Flash brought us to here.  I am a very grateful man.

EPILOGUE: August 30, 2016

The story isn’t over, of course.  The reminders will keep coming.  We will find dog hair in long-unused rooms, like pine needles six months after Christmas.  We may be arrested for an instant, or perhaps be in tears for longer than that.  But for Lucy and Dan and Kathy and me, Flash will always live in our memories, a vibrant pooch that wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.  He was going to keep at it until you loved him back.   

When I think back to the days when I wished he lived elsewhere, it shames me.  But I know he didn’t hold it against me.  After all, he won, right?  I did love him, I do miss him, and when I came in this afternoon after work I cried when there was nobody to greet me.

It was simply his time.  Flash knew it.  We all knew it.   

This winter, when the snow falls, creating a blanket around our sleeping boys, we will know that we made the correct decision when we chose to seal Flash’s glorious past.  When the spring comes, and the first crocus pops up through the soil, we will know that it was a gently wagging tail that sent it to us.

R.I.P. FLASH 

August, 2001-August 2016

LAST DAY: August 29, 2016 (Morning)

When I drag myself out of bed and make my way to the living room, the first thing I see is my wife sitting on the floor with Flash in her arms.  She’ll have to be at work in an hour, but some things are more important.  “He got out of his bed last night at four in the morning and moved over to your side of the bed,” she explained.  “And after that, I didn’t sleep.”

Flash moving around at night is a fairly recent development, a manifestation of his blindness and dementia, the vet believes.  In his uncertainty about where he is and how long it is until morning, he’ll lay on my side of the bed because I am usually the first one up.  I’ve learned to put that first foot on the floor gingerly, as the first thing I feel some mornings is a furry ribcage beneath me.

He eats, he goes outside, he takes a nap.  Kath goes to work.  And then, Nap Part Deux, the nap of naps, where it gets good and quiet.  He doesn’t stir when I begin to assemble my chores for the day, a quick trip to the grocery store, the bank and the library.  Pretty much a standard list for one of my writing Fridays.  When I return an hour later, he doesn’t appeared to have moved, but he still greets me with a wagging tail that strikes the living room area rug with a muted thump.  He slowly gets to his feet and makes it about five steps before he throws up his breakfast.  I usher him outside and clean up the mess before I join him on the deck.

In a few hours, I will give my consent to a person that will administer a medication that stops Flash’s heart, and I don’t know how I will be.  Still, I worry more about the children.  Will there be a good friend, or even a big-hearted stranger, that will offer them solace at a low point in their young lives?  I have to hope that there is.  I will have Kathy, Kathy will have me.  When we are parents, we want to shield our children from this kind of hurt and there is no chance of doing that today.  I feel like a big part of my stoicism is in response to their grief, in that I feel I have to be strong for them.  When it is all revealed as a façade this afternoon, will I be able to get through the burial without a breakdown?  I am hoping I can. 

So I go about the task of making a dinner for after, and a bacon cheeseburger for before.  The vet says I can feed him up to the very last minute.  I would be okay with that if the last minute wasn’t coming so fast.